Thursday, December 01, 2005

DID GOD SPILL COFFEE ON HIS MASTER PLAN?

Perhaps you’ve heard of the recent uproar over Intelligent Design. It’s the latest development in the war between the right and the left over what we should teach our children in school.

On the one side you’ve got the hard core fundamentalist Christian right who believe evolution is bunk and espouse a strict curriculum of Creationism. Then you’ve got the whole liberal, scientific, atheist crowd invoking Darwin’s ghost in promoting an evolutionary agenda. It’s an ideological tug of war with compromise seemingly impossible.

Enter the Intelligent Design folks. These enterprising minds have essentially merged the two disparate beliefs in building an ambitious theory that effectively satisfies neither side.

The theory behind Intelligent Design is really only attractive to people (like me) who’d just like to see everyone get along for a change. It suggests that the science of evolution is a consequence of divine intention. In other words, there is something (God, perhaps) behind the science of our existence. "Yes, we came from apes - but God made it so!"

The bible and science give us very different reasons for being. Intelligent Design attempts to reconcile the two, claiming to provide an objective perspective on the question of our existence. Where the bible says God created everything in under a week, including human beings in His own image, and science says we evolved over millions of years from apes, Intelligent Design leaves room for the possibility that evolution was God’s way of getting us here. Not surprisingly, both scientists and bible huggers reject this notion out of hand.

What is the true origin of our species? Are we truly the result of divine inspiration? Are we a complex evolutionary accident? Or are “we” merely an illusion in one of Doug Henning's masterful performances? Perhaps “we” are, in fact, one…and these words are not mine, but OURS. You read them as though they are external to you, when they actually live inside of you. I live inside of you. We are each other. Did we forget our medication this morning?

I'm not going to tell you what to believe - that's up to you. All I really wanted to say today was that we shouldn’t rule out the very real possibility that a flying spaghetti monster is responsible for this mess we call life. Hey, it’s just a theory.